Tag: Ordained by a Predator
Interview with Molly Smith
Christ a Prophet? + Book Signing
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On Sunday, December 4, from 3pm – 5pm, we will have a book-signing party at the Grand Fiesta venue, 6812 Greensboro Road, Ridgeway, VA.
Please come.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase. $15.95.
If you can’t make it, you can also order on-line by clicking HERE.
The Publisher is Taking Pre-Orders for My Book
Ordained by a Predator: Becoming a Priest in the Middle of a Criminal Conspiracy will ship in November.
It will make a lovely Christmas gift 🙂
They interviewed me about it via e-mail and on camera. Part of the video is in the second tweet below.
Book Update
The Lord Jesus Christ conquered death and gave us divine love. He entrusted His doctrine and His saving mysteries to His Apostles.
The Apostles’ successors in office–the pope and bishops, with priests as their co-workers: they govern the Church. They teach and sanctify in the person of Christ, the Head of the Church.
To deny this is to deny a truth about the Christian religion. It would make you a heretic or schismatic, to deny it.
At the same time, though: Among the men in collars, there have been many criminals. Criminals who have gravely harmed innocent people. And among the men in miters: Also quite a few genuine criminals.
One criminal who wore a miter is Theodore McCarrick. This year he may very well finally plead guilty–or be condemned as guilty–in a civil criminal court, and be sent to jail.
As we covered in March, another criminal bishop is Gustavo Zanchetta. He languishes in an Argentine prison now.
McCarrick and Zanchetta have this in common: Pope Francis abused his ecclesiastical authority to cover up their crimes. In McCarrick’s case, the cover-up succeeded for many years, and it involved Popes Benedict XVI and John Paull II, as well. In Zanchetta’s case, the cover-up lasted for a few years of the Francis papacy.
In both cases, the cover-ups ended because of the courage of laypeople. Both cover-ups would still be in full swing, if the whole thing had been left up to the pope.
Having the authority of an Apostle–even having the authority of St. Peter–does not give a man the right to silence someone who is trying to tell the truth about criminal acts.
The cover-uppers in the hierarchy tell themselves that they must silence such truth-tellers, in order to preserve the good name of the Church. But this is a self-serving lie.
What the bullies are trying to protect is actually just their own personal reputations. The cover-ups involve not real churchmanship, but pure worldliness–worldliness masquerading as zeal for Christ.
Christ crucified shows Himself in the victims of the crimes. The cover-up machine of the mitered bullies serves only to obscure Him from view. But the bullies nonetheless will stop at nothing, so that they can retain their sinecures.
My book Ordained by a Predator explains all this, with the necessary concrete evidence.
I wrote the first draft in August of 2020, and I submitted the final text to the publisher in August of 2021. The first edition will become available from St. Michael’s Media in August of this year.
The publisher sent me the final typeset draft recently, so that I could prepare an index, as well as find a couple prominent people to endorse the book. I am honored that two clerical sex-abuse survivors, and leaders of the community, have agreed to do so.
A lot has happened with me since I wrote the book, so Book #2 is very much in the works. But the situation in the Church has hardly changed since August 2020.
So I believe Ordained by a Predator will offer something that the world still does not have, even four years after the notorious Summer of Shame, 2018.
Namely: A thorough account of the ordeal that McCarrick’s victims have faced, in their dealings with the Vatican cover-up machine. This includes, also, the bullying that I myself have endured.
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May it please God, let’s get together in person when the book becomes available. We will work on organizing gatherings in various parts of Virginia, across the USA, and maybe even abroad as well.
More to come on this.
I am a Moron
The late Archbishop Peter Gerety‘s name appears in the draft of my book.
From Chapter 2…
McCarrick successfully sold the myth of his glittering celebrity status not just to his victims but to a wider circle. Newark needed a new Archbishop in 1986; McCarrick became the young pope of New Jersey. His predecessor, Peter Gerety, claimed to have grown old at age 73, even though he went on to live to 104.
Something odd with Gerety leaving office in 1986, to be sure: A bishop resigning at 73, claiming the infirmity of old age. Then he goes on to live to 104.
Odd.
In an earlier version of the chapter, I had speculated that Gerety was “too liberal” for Pope John Paul II. McCarrick successfully sold himself as a “moderate.” I decided to take that speculation out. Superfluous.
But:
I am a moron.
Why, after all, am I here? In the situation in which I find myself now?
In May of 2006, the Cardinal Archbishop who ordained me resigned suddenly, claiming old age despite his evident vigor. My priest friends and I thought: It’s because he’s too liberal for Pope Benedict.
We were wrong, of course.
We now know why McCarrick “resigned” prematurely in 2006. Namely, so that the Vatican could orchestrate a cover-up of his crimes, a cover-up that would last for the next twelve years.
And the cover-up would remain in effect now, and McCarrick’s victims would still live in agonizing solitude.
(And I guess my priest friends and I would still think McCarrick got ushered out for being “too liberal,” and Donald Wuerl would still be the Archbishop of Washington, and the biggest controversy of Pope Francis’ papacy would still be communion for the divorced and civilly re-married…)
But McCarrick’s victim “Mike” told his story to a New-York lawyer in 2017. The jig was up on the McCarrick cover-up. I blogged the heck out of it, and now I’m facing expulsion from the clerical state for it.
So:
Why o why would I have thought–after all this–that Peter Gerety got ushered out of Newark in 1986 for “being too liberal?” What kind of numbskull am I?
A 49-year-old woman (name withheld) has filed suit in New Jersey. Her sworn affidavit states that Gerety molested her when she was five years old, in 1976–two years into Gerety’s tenure.
[WARNING Not easy to read, taken from a Bergen Record article by Abbott Koloff, who gained access to the affidavit.]
She grew up in Newark near the Cathedral Basilica of Sacred Heart. Her mother “worked long hours as a seamstress” and Gerety allegedly offered to babysit.
One day Gerety took her by the hand to his bedroom. She described the room as being simply furnished, with the prelate’s bed pushed up against a wall and an old Bible on a table.
“Gerety told me to relax and close my eyes and informed me that what he was going to do with me was part of what God required and wanted me to do,” she wrote, adding that the archbishop gave her a warning: “Do not say anything about this because it will hurt your mother. This is our secret.”
She wrote that he walked her back to her home.
The abuse allegedly occurred three or four times, always in the rectory bedroom. She wrote that it stopped after she protested being left with the archbishop and an aunt offered to watch her. She remained silent about the allegations “as I had been instructed” until she was 13, when she told her older sister.
“My older sister cried when I told her and she said she felt guilty because she hadn’t or couldn’t protect me,” she wrote. “However, neither of us ever mentioned the abuse to our mother.”
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Dear Reader, I do need help to pay my canon lawyer to fight Bishop Barry Knestout’s unjust actions against me. Click HERE if you can donate something. Thank you.
Father Mark White Blog 